Safetyism and Wokeism leverage our altruistic instincts to effect submission to irrational policies that were never designed to be rationally justifiable in the first place. Instead, it seems increasingly clear, both ideologies function sociologically like religion.
Author Archives: Allen Porter
Allen Porter is a 2021-2022 John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. The two main focuses of his current research are bioethics and political philosophy. His dissertation, “Social Justice Leftism as Deconstructive Postmodernism,” offers a unified explanation of a number of novel phenomena associated with what is now commonly called “the woke left”—including the use of various techniques of “silencing” (such as “deplatforming”), calls by students for racially segregated campus spaces, the new rhetoric of “equity,” “microaggression” complaints and demands for “safe spaces,” and more. His thesis is that the existence and features of these phenomena are straightforwardly predictable in light of their underlying political ideology, which results from combining philosophical postmodernism and political leftism—a political ideology which has dominated Western humanities and social science departments for several decades, and which increasingly prevails outside of academia as a kind of secular religion. At Princeton, he is focused on converting his dissertation into a book. Allen holds a B.A. in German from Princeton University, a M.A. in Philosophy from Tulane University, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rice University.